The Cigar makers Museum

The cigar industry dominated Valkenswaard for more than a century. The first cigar factory was started, behind his house on the market square, in 1865 by Jan van Best, at that moment the wealthiest resident of Valkenswaard. The factory was intended for his three sons, explaining the name van Best Brothers. It is unknown why van Best entered the cigar-making trade, although his grandson suggested the developments in Eindhoven probably served as an example. After all, Valkenswaard was certainly not the first municipality where cigars were made. As far as is known Kampen was the first Dutch town in 1826 and ‘s Hertogenbosch, the capital of Brabant, was also producing cigars around 1840. Eindhoven, that already had a tradition in tobacco, saw P. Hoefnagels start producing cigars in 1845.

Van Best Brothers started with three employees: one cigar-maker, who learned the profession in Antwerp, and two apprentices. For a long period van Best was the only producer of cigars in Valkenswaard. Not until the late 1870’s did a few enterprising men follow the example, but their factories or more exactly small works were short-lived. The van Best factory flourished, employing more than 130 workers by 1880 and owning a branch in Leende. At the end of the 1880’s the van Best factory was among the 100 biggest factories in the Netherlands.

Real competition was on the cards and in 1882 the Luijksgestel born Pieter Hoekx began, together with his brother-in-law Johannes Maas, a cigar factory on the grounds behind his house. Around 1920 the company Hoekx-Maas outstripped the founder van Best and became the biggest cigar factory in Valkenswaard. In their wake a lot of small businessman tried their luck in the cigar industry, but most of them remained small works.

All in all Valkenswaard counted fifteen factories and small works in 1900, and by 1920 there were 42 of them, where around 1,100 employees earned their keep. In the first half of the twentieth century about half of the male working population of Valkenswaard was employed in the local cigar industry. As hardly anybody worked outside his own municipality a rather isolated community arose, an isolation which was only broken through as late as after the Second World War.

The tide changed for the cigar industry about 1920. The introduction of the tobacco excise and the conclusion of the first collective agreement resulted in a raise of the cost price. Mechanization makes its appearance and with that the scaling-up. In Valkenswaard in the twenties and thirties of the twentieth century two factories became dominant: Hofnar and Willem II, owned by the families Wolters and Kersten. Just before the Second World War Valkenswaard could present 26 factories, giving employment to 3,700 people in Valkenswaard itself as well as in the surrounding branches. Almost 3,000 of these worked in the two largest factories.

During the Second World War the production of cigars gradually came to an almost complete standstill and after the war, due to a shortage of tobacco, not all factories could start up again. In the fifties, the mechanization process resumed and led to a collapse in the 1956. One after the other factory had to close up shop, including the very first factory in Valkenswaard, the Van Best factory, which finally closed its doors in cigar industry Only Hofnar and Willem II remained and were the absolute monarchs of the Valkenswaard tobacco industry and went on to play an important role at a national level, although even their existence was threatened at the beginning of the seventies. The disappearance of rate boundaries, the explosive raise in wage expenditure, the change in fashion and taste and the rising anti-smoke lobby were to blame. The Hofnar factory went bankrupt in 1990 and the Willem II factory was finally taken over by Swedish Match. This concern is still settled in Valkenswaard, but the last cigar produced in Valkenswaard itself was back in 2003.

What has the cigar industry brought to Valkenswaard? Thanks to this industry the population increased explosively. Between 1880 and 1920 the population quadrupled and Valkenswaard was one of the fastest growing municipalities in the province Noord-Brabant. Even then the existence of work had an attractive effect on people from elsewhere looking for employment. Many young people came to Valkenswaard and the consequence was a decline in the age of marriage as well as a great influx in childbirth.

For a long period the making of cigars remained a “young” profession. In 1880 the average age of a Valkenswaard cigar maker was 21 years, whereas the average farmer in Valkenswaard was 47 years old. But the earnings of the cigar-makers were not so good up till the First World War; three-quarters of them earned too little to exceed the poverty limit. After that it became better and Valkenswaard had “a modest prosperity, shared by all”, as an external research bureau put it in the fifties of the last century. The larger factory owners had mostly made good profits in the production of cigars, even though they also went through rough patches. Frans van Best writes in his memoirs that between 1930 and 1940 the van Best Brothers continuously ran into debt.

Unfortunately, relatively few places are prominent to the public eye in Valkenswaard. Of course, we have the Willem II square and the Hofnar theatre, but the buildings, the machines and the people have disappeared. The so characteristic smell when cycling through the Bakkerstraat, that the older inhabitants recall, has gone and recently the Botycos-building on the Waalreseweg was demolished, so that only a solitary factory building remains. We must do our best to preserve this, just as the building which houses bar San Remo in the Karel Mollenstraat, built by the Valkenswaard cigar-makers club in 1904, even if there are very few people left that know this.

On the other side, a lot has been saved, indoors, more precisely in the Falconry and Cigar-makers Museum.